After we made it back to the office platform and got what nano-tech protection we could it said we should investigate the C&C platform to find out what more it knew about the Captain's condition and what had happened to the ship. It gave us some anti-grav belts to get to the C&C platform, but it didn't want to take us there itself in case it got infected by the Sanctus Sanguine virus. Quold spent about an hour trying to convince it to tell us about the security protocols for C&C and I think by the end of it he was getting pretty anxious. Eventually it showed us a full schematic it had acquired when acting as a routing station during some kind of network upgrade. It seemed surprisingly smug for a machine and it made damn sure we knew it outranked us.
It said the C&C, whilst it had many intrusion countermeasures, would use most of its nano-tech mass to maintain command and control functions throughout the ship at all times. It was also the most likely node in the Captain's quarters to have access to outside communication. It also turned out that the office node still had all the wireless capabilities to communicate with C&C, so Quold and STD-01 tried to convince it to make a cyber attack on the C&C platform at the same time we made a physical one. They argued with it for quite some time but ultimately it refused, saying it couldn't afford to lose any more nano-mass if it was going to maintain its own security. Boomeron found a gauss pistol he'd forgotten about in one of his pockets, and said something about making it into an EMP grenade of some kind. I don't think you can really do that, but he spent a while fiddling with it and seemed convinced he'd done it.
The office platform maneuvered us into position above the C&C platform to jump across on the AG harnesses. We could see one large central display with four slightly smaller displays arrayed around it. We were preparing to start shooting the C&C platform when Quold started pleading with the office platform to help us. It eventually gave in and released some more drones to act as a botnet, distracting the C&C platform while we attacked it. Chaz sprayed a whole half tank of flamer fluid onto the island and Skrood threw a couple of flares, which set most of the surface alight. I braced the alien sniper weapon against the forward edge of the office platform. I targeted the C&C platform and pulled what Gav had said was the trigger. A 12 foot green flash fired out of the end of the barrel and a green flash crashed into the C&C platform. A shockwave spread out from the impact point, putting out most of the flames, and cracked some of the more rigid sections and the display screens. Our platform was rocked by the shockwave. We were all knocked around a bit and Gav, STD-01 and Quold fell down. The C&C platform was rather blackened and smoking, still floating but listing to one side.
We gathered everyone together to go and try to interface with the C&C platform in its weakened state. Chaz decided Quold should stay on the office platform to make sure it stayed secure, and he seemed quite keen on the idea. We all leapt across OK, with Boomeron displaying particular finesse in the air, apart from Gav who mistimed his jump and landed on his face. As soon as we landed we could tell that the C&C platform’s defences were trying to use nanotech to attack us. The suits the office platform gave us were holding for now but Gav’s was somewhat damaged from the prolonged contact during and after his impact, though it was still holding.
STD-01 got out the nano-lockpick, saying he could use it create a data port to access the node. He stuck the lockpick into the floor in front of him and then reeled back, screaming and bleeding from the ears and eyes. Obviously we hadn’t distracted enough of the platform’s processing mass for STD-01’s attack to work so we set about trashing it some more. Chaz sprayed bleach into every access port and memory slot she could find, which seemed to make the platform smoke some more. Gav opened up on the remaining consoles and screens with his advanced riot shotgun and smashed the hell out of everything in his line of fire. Weird tentacles started sprouting up from the damaged areas so I set about hacking them down with my scraper. Boomeron started scouting around the platform and found an undefended section where the xeno sniper weapon had hit. STD-01 went back to his hacking attempts, but found the nano-lockpick was stuck into the ground in the same place he’d attempted to interface with the platform before so he had to stay where he was.
We felt another wave of nanobot attacks hitting our shields. Another wave of tentacles came at me at the same time and they seemed much more scraper resistant. They seemed to be more resistant to Gav’s shotgun too. Skrood threw a grenade, I thought aiming for a particularly large clump of tentacles, but missed them and blew up some of the remaining consoles instead. Boomeron had a go at some of them with his assault rifle but it didn’t seem to do much. We carried on fending off tentacles, and Gav seemed to get the shot just right with his shotgun this time. Boomeron shot some more tentacles next to the ones Gav had shot but his shotguns shells didn’t seem to have any effect, I guess the tentacles had reconfigured against that particular type of attack. I decided to switch to my laser rifle to try and keep the tentacles at a distance. Then I remembered this setting I discovered before where you could fire a sustained beam. I cut down a large swathe of tentacles with the sustained beam but it used a lot of the charge in the power pack.
Some weapons pods had formed on the other side of the platform and they fired on all of us. My armour took most of the shot and Gav dived out of the way. The others mostly seemed fine apart from Skrood, who was knocked to one side by a spray of fire. I fired back at the weapons pods but the laser beams just seemed to bounce off, kind of like a laser light show at a rock concert. STD-01 said he’d made some progress hacking the platform and could control some of the systems if he knew how to program them. Boomeron did something weird and his eyes started glowing, then he started telling STD-01 what commands to input. Whatever they did must have worked because the platform started forming a defensive wall around the impact site where we had regrouped.
We held out in the dead area of the platform and managed to keep the tentacles off STD-01 long enough for him to access the sensor logs. The ship had apparently been hit by an asteroid sized munition. Defensive fire did a lot of damage to the projectile but didn’t stop payload from reaching the ship, which was a phasing bioweapon composed of the crystals we’d all seen during the attack. The ship was off course from our attack target, supposedly an ‘easy soft target’ who had allied with our most recently vanquished enemy. He also found out that the anti-nelotic shielding which sustains the celestial’s light within the ship is failing, so we definitely do have to leave. He also found that the C&C station had been used to insert the Sanctus Sanguine virus into the computer system and that the Captain had inserted the programming himself, though all traces of the virus had been thoroughly cleansed from this node. The package was distributed amongst most of the computer’s nodes because it had all the correct security certificates to avoid the firewalls and spread to enough nodes quickly enough that it couldn’t be stopped by any of the intrusion countermeasures.
Boomeron managed to find some information on forming the nano-tech patterns in the platform’s database, and also determined that the platform was in the middle of a catastrophic shutdown so we shouldn’t stay on it much longer. Gav tried to check out the ship’s targeting data but couldn’t find anything more than a list of expended munitions, which was rather long! After a while he found that most of the main weapons systems were offline or severely damaged so would have trouble targeting us once we were out in voidspace in the shuttle, though some of the secondary surface defences were still active.
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